Observations from Iraq, Iran, Israel, the Arab world and beyond

AFGHANISTAN: Seven years after CIA abduction, prisoner still held without charge

August 28, 2009 | 7:13
am

Seven years after being abducted from Dubai, United Arab Emirates, by the CIA
and shipped to the U.S. air base in Bagram, Afghanistan, Haji Pacha
Wazir was hoping he would finally be free.

The Afghan government
had cleared him for release, and a recent court ruling allowed him to
petition his case in a U.S. federal court.

But Wazir's petition was dismissed based on "lack of jurisdiction," despite the fact that Wazir, an Afghan national,
has been in the sole custody of the U.S. government since his arrest, according to the nonprofit organization representing him.

Now, the International Justice Network, which also
represents a number of other detainees, has announced that it will
appeal Wazir's case.

"Unlike our Yemeni and Tunisian
clients whose cases were not dismissed, Mr. Wazir is being denied
fundamental legal and human rights based on his Afghan citizenship,"
the group's executive director, Tina Monshipour Foster, said in
a statement released Thursday. "We will ask the Court of Appeals to
remedy the
obvious injustice of denying Afghan nationals the same rights afforded
other foreign nationals at Bagram."

This year, a judge ruled that Bagram detainees may appeal their detentions in U.S. courts. But according to the International Justice Network,
Obama administration lawyers fought to have all its clients' petitions
dismissed. In the end, the judge agreed to hear the petitions from the
non-Afghan detainees but dismissed Wazir's, citing potential "friction"
with the Afghan government.

Wazir is one of hundreds of Afghans and others who have been held
as "enemy combatants" at Bagram, a former Soviet air base that has has
been plagued by allegations of torture since the start of the U.S. war
in Afghanistan. The same judge who ultimately dismissed Wazir's
petition wrote in an earlier ruling that conditions at Bagram "fall
well short of what the Supreme Court found inadequate at Guantanamo."

When it came to light, the extraordinary rendition program was condemned loudly in the U.S. and abroad and became a source of embarrassment for the Bush administration, which had long argued that normal legal protections do not apply to enemy combatants. Although candidate Barack Obama ran on a platform of restoring America's credibility abroad, he disappointed many of Bush's critics by preserving a version of the rendition program.